Red tattoo of a jagged grinning face with X-shaped eyes on the back of a person's neck, with hair pulled up.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red X-eyed grin on the back of the neck

Neck · Colour · Photo

A red tattoo of a grinning face with X-shaped eyes and a row of jagged, drip-like teeth or scratch marks below. The lines are bold and slightly ragged, with soft red shading that gives a torn or scratched-skin look. The tattoo is centred on the back of the neck, with hair pulled up and a metal clip visible at the top of the frame.

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down, you'll not hear properly from there. Aye, that's the one. Painted on the bow of the Mercy Jane the spring she came off the slip at Stourport, and nobody asked what it meant. Red as a fresh graze. Two crosses for eyes and a grin underneath like a man who's just been told the price of coal.

Keep reading

Her owner was Dolly Fenner, widowed twice, who ran that boat up the Trent and down the Severn and never once let a lock-keeper finish a sentence. She painted the face herself with a rag and a tin of barn red. Said the river had been clawing at her for thirty years and she wanted it to see how it looked when it was clawed back.

Then came the winter of the big flood. The Mercy Jane broke her mooring at Gainsborough with four hundred tons of slate on deck and went off down the current like a drunk at a wedding. Dolly stood at the tiller with that grin on the bow in front of her. The lad meant to help her ran for the bank. The river tore the rails, the cabin door and the chimney clean off. It did not take her. When they hauled her out at Trent Lock, the hull was scored from stem to stern with long torn lines, and the bow face had its teeth raked down, as if something had been dragging its nails across it to get in.

Dolly only laughed. "Told you," she said. "Scratch all you like. I've still got the face."

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